Cinemasterworks: Christmas With the Krampus

My one-sentence review of Krampus: It's great, go see it!

My multi-sentence review is below. Beware, maties, here there be spoilers!

The Movie

Krampus is an ancient German mythological creature. He's an evil Santa Claus, a horned & hoofed monster who punishes kids on Christmas rather than bringing gifts. For further info- BAM.

In this here movie, we have a dysfunctional family getting a holiday visit from an even more dysfunctional family and everything's very dysfunctional. It's a classic setup for a holiday comedy/drama and then it yanks the rug out in Act Two.

A young boy loses his faith in Santa Claus amid the family chaos and he wishes that his family would go away. Krampus hears his wish and a severe blizzard descends and knocks out the power. And then the title monster and his minions attack the block. Minions include super-vicious mutant versions of: teddy bear, doll, jack-in-the-box, toy robot, elves, and gingerbread men.

Never thought a jack-in-the-box would give me nightmares...

It's a romp. The jack-in-the-box was surprisingly horrifying. Very little CGI, too. The monsters are done well with practical effects.

Now- time to nitpick!

The Myth

Krampus doesn't really do anything that he's supposed to do here. Yeah, he's got the look and the chains and he certainly punishes people. But he mostly just stalks around menacingly, leaping from housetop to housetop and descending chimneys.

He's supposed to capture kids, put them in his bag, and beat them with sticks. This never happens! He never gives coal, either. (Coal distribution is one thing he has in common with our traditional-values Santa.) He just hands out wooden jingle bells at a couple points in the movie.

Most of his actions have a Christmas-y flavor to them and are dark twists on holiday traditions and tropes, but the movie seems to be making up its own mythology about the Krampus beast. There's nothing really wrong with that, but it would have taken almost no effort for the filmmakers to throw us a couple more accurate mythological bones here.

Maybe they're saving them for the sequel?

Killing Children

Kids are murdered here! This is probably the most gleefully demented Christmas horror movie since Gremlins. And it's implied in that movie that the Gremlins are attacking the entire town. And we see the Gremlins kill people. So we can conclude that a lot of people are dying in there. But the movie drew the line on killing kids. (If the Gremlins did that, the movie didn't show it, or even imply it.)

But this has multiple kids getting menaced by Krampus & co. with an off-screen death implied. Plus two kids get thrown into a flaming pit of death. And heck, in one scene, we see a kid get swallowed whole by the razor-toothed, boa constrictor-esque jack-in-the-box. Swallowed whole! And the scene that follows is super-tense because another kid is threatened with swallowing and we're hoping that they'll rescue the swallowed kid before the kid dies or gets digested in the belly of the box-beast.

But NOPE! Our last glimpse of that kid is of it being devoured and probably suffering a horrible suffocating death inside a mutant jack-in-the-box. Cruelest death since that babysitter getting devoured by the sea monster-saurus thing in Jurassic World.

There's No Rules!

Like another popular horror film from this past year- It Follows- this film has a consistency problem.

The limits of Krampus and the monsters are never clear. We never understand how much power they have and their weaknesses are not explained or explored. Sometimes you can shoot the monsters and kill them, sometimes not. Sometimes fire works, sometimes not. Krampus is never seriously confronted, so we have no idea if he even has any weaknesses.

When a film doesn't make its rules clear, I always think of that Little Caesar's commercial and shout "There's no rules!" You should do the same.

And what's up with the elves? They're made out to be super-terrifying and their appearance is a huge event...and then they just hold the family at spear point. They're either wearing silly masks or those silly masks are supposed to be their actual faces. Either way, elves=major letdown. (Only Terry Pratchett can do scary elves right.)

That Opening Sequence

I didn't make this connection until the next day- they don't hang a lampshade on this, but the opening sequence isn't just a throwaway joke. It has a meaningful connection to the grandmother's childhood flashback.

The film starts with a slo-mo montage of people trampling each other in a store on Black Friday. People fight, get tazered, and are generally awful as an upbeat Christmas song plays.

This gets a huge laugh. It's a gem of a sequence and a great way to start the movie. But it's quickly forgotten, as it never connects to the rest of the film.

Or does it?

In a vividly animated flashback later in the film, the German grandmother character talks about her childhood and how rough things were in her small German village. People turned on each other, stole food, and were generally awful. This led to her unintentionally summoning Krampus, who proceeds to take her family away and punish the entire town.

This explains a puzzling element in the film- it happens off-screen, but Krampus and his pals wreck every house in the neighborhood and presumably kill or capture every resident. This seems oddly harsh, since the boy only asked that his own family get taken away. But the Black Friday opening sequence explains that we're ALL naughty and we've turned into the same kinds of awful people that turned on each other back in Germany's severe economic depression.

And thus we must all be punished. And Krampus is happy to dole out the punishment.

That Ending

It has a deeply ambiguous ending.

Things go downhill and get darker and darker in the last act and this is a PG-13 film, so it reaches a point where you know they're gonna have to cop out.

And they do. It was all a dream.

Or was it?

The little boy wakes up and finds his family alive again, happy and getting along and enjoying Christmas morning and all seems well with the world. He's hugging his parents and overjoyed and then sees that he's been given a jingle bell in a box from Krampus. Everyone in the house starts looking at each other pensively.

And then it pans out to reveal their house is inside a glass snow globe that Krampus is placing on a shelf. It pans further out to reveal Krampus' lair is full of similar snow globes.

It looks a lot like this. Way to spoil the last scene, marketing people!

Now. Does this mean that they all actually died and Krampus has their spirits trapped under the dome forever? Or does this mean that Krampus really granted the boy's wish and gave him a happy Christmas under the condition that they all behave and keep their Christmas spirits high, because Krampus is watching and he'll get them if they don't behave?

There's probably other ways you can read it, too. Most ways you look at it, it's a cop-out. But if it makes you happy, you can believe that they're really all dead!

Conclusion

The film is very messed-up and a lot of fun! There's some classic images and scenes in here and it's a wild ride that leaves you exhilarated and entertained. Horror-comedies are tough to pull off and they made a noble attempt here. It's very much a horror film with comic touches and the balance feels just right. Take your whole dysfunctional family out to see it!

-Phony McFakename

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